The bench sat on the side of the Mound facing south towards the Field. Four-hundred-ish mancers, including twenty-eight Ultras, had graduated three days before, the entire Asylum and selected parents turned out to watch. I’d worked hard so my dad would be on the list, but he’d been unable to get the time off work, which is nothing new for me, I guess . . . at least I’d gotten a phone call out of him, even if it had ended in cursing . . .
Three days, but that’s a lot of mess to clean up, the Field still remained covered in debris—discarded programs and tissues, even a graduation cap or few—the platform where the diplomas had been handed out was still erect, but it wouldn’t last another day. The Asylum had moved on from Class 2009. I was the only one left. Still undecided. The last one . . . just like Day Number One.
“You hear right, Miss Dale.”
She’d snuck up from behind, as sneaky as always. I’d never gotten her actual age from her but she’d probably gotten to forty by then. Not that you could really tell. Few more wrinkles maybe, but she looked just as good as always, just as alive. Long blond hair with not a trace of gray, eyes still blue, and lips that still smiled with mystery and curiosity. Hands soft and thin and ready to push your buttons. Ceinwyn Dale and the bench have some things in common too.
I sat up and she sat down next to me, looking out over the same garbage-filled area I’d been since the day dawned. The sun was on the way down, if not falling into view. I’d been out there for a long time, but I had a lot to think about, and even more to decide. Nothing would sit right with me.
“Tell me what your thoughts are, King Henry, and maybe I can help.”
“You want me to join the Recruitment team,” I said, blunt as always, if a not as vulgar as always.
She shook her head. “No . . . I would take you if you offered, but . . . no, not that. You’ve graduated, you’re twenty-one now . . . you’ve earned the right to do what you want without my pushing, don’t you think?”
“Earned what? A piece of paper that ain’t taking me anywhere?” I shook my head too. “What the fuck have I done with my life?”
That earned a ‘ha!’ at the least. “You were stealing, smoking, fighting, cursing, had emotional problems, were lucky to get a ‘C’ on most tests you took, were rebellious, racist and sexist, and look at you now. You’ve grown up, you’re near the top of your year, you’ve done great things for your friends and enemies alike, and you’re the most sought after mancer to graduate in probably twenty years . . .”
When she said it like that I had to downplay it. Twenty years, maybe, of course Ceinwyn Dale graduated about twenty years before I did. I met her eyes, wondered what it had been like for her. When I talked, it was still about myself, “That still fights and curses and has more emotional problems and to this day loves him some old-fashion rebellion, especially if there’s whiskey involved.”
Her smile twitched. “We’ll work on those over the next seven years.”
“And that’s the point . . .”
“King Henry Price can only change so much?”
“More like, I’m not ready to change anymore yet.” I gave my chest a pound with my fist. “I want to be this me for awhile. Not some other person’s tool.”
Leaning back over the bench, she pulled a bag from where I’d been unable to see it. Clipping it open, she removed a pair of sodas, handing me one—next came a pair of sub-sandwiches from the Cafeteria, which were split. Ham and Pastrami, no mayo or mustard, but onions and mushrooms, just the way I liked it—what didn’t Ceinwyn Dale know about me? “You’ve been out here awhile,” she explained.
I guess I had. Was used to waking up at 6AM, it had to be almost 5PM . . . so yeah, awhile was a word for it. “The Guild wants me.”
“Yes.”
I took a sip of coke. “You’d take me.”
“If I have to . . .”
I took a bite of sandwich, reminding my stomach it existed and earning a rumble. I wouldn’t miss much from the Asylum, but I’d miss the Cafeteria food. “Plutarch thinks I should become a teacher.”
“I’ve heard.”
“Well . . . those are the three choices I’d actually consider doing,” I told her.
She let me hang myself up in silence as she had some of her own sandwich, some kind of duck or pheasant or other expensive organic avian meat in some Frenchy looking hole-filled bread that only the teachers got to choose from.
“What are the negatives of each job?” she asked. “Why are you unwilling to try for some more change?”
I put three fingers up, my favorite one and his best two buddies. “The Guild’s a constrictive piece-of-shit filled with moldy, dust-filled cocksuckers who make this place seem like a New Age cult. Five more years of training to learn the Guild designs and then . . . what? Pumping out pre-designated item after item based on whatever the economic needs are, or based upon whichever containment vial of anima they send to me for the day? Forget that shit. That’s cog in the machine work.
“And that’s not even getting into their rules. No experimentation. No design upgrades. And of course, ‘I hereby swear to never make an artifact that can harm another human being, especially a mancer, or change the elemental nature of the world.’ So no weapons, no defenses, no change at all with that one. Just the same old bullshit while the problem keeps getting worse.”
She finished her sandwich, giving me some more quiet like she always knew how to manage.
Eventually, she asked, “Then why haven’t you crossed them off?”
I looked at my three fingers, brought up right in front of my face. “I want to be an Artificer before a normal mancer. I love working over anima experimentation. When I finished my Cold Cuffs Hex and showed them to Plutarch, that’s one of the best moments of my life. But . . .” One of my fingers dropped. “I can’t stomach the rules . . .”
“Speaking of Plutarch . . .” she prodded.
“Me teaching . . .” I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all. “Haven’t we learned this lesson? I can’t believe the Lady would even accept it.”
“I doubt she’d have you teach Languages again given the vocabulary your class exited the year with,” Ceinwyn Dale agreed, “but Plutarch is getting old. We’ve known it was coming for some time and we’ll need a replacement in the next ten years. Better to have someone training up to the spot, maybe as an Elementalism teacher. Keith Gullick spoke highly of you before he caught you making out with Naomi during Pent.”
“Not my finest moment,” I commented. “I seem to remember tequila from Jethro Smith’s liquor cabinet being involved.”
She ignored me. “Or perhaps Theory of Anima, you couldn’t possibly do worse than Audrey Quilt.”
“You really need to get over the whole aeromancy thing, Miss Dale. You ladies all know it’s the Mancy making you do it and you still can’t let it go.”
She gave me a cold look. Frigid gale cold. Cold enough to shrivel my balls up to nothing and it was summer. “Mind your business with another’s rivalry, King Henry, unless you want me to bring up Heinrich and your idiotic feud that has cost this school so much.”
I grunted. She had a point. “Consider me chastised, I guess.”
“Indeed . . .”
“Getting away from the Asylum, that’s why. I don’t want to be locked up here. And if I take over for Plutarch . . . my experiments would have to be approved by the Lady . . . then her replacement whenever the old bag finally keels over. I have good memories . . . but . . .” The other friend went down, leaving only the flipping bird, saluting the entire of the Asylum down below us.
“And what is so horrible about becoming a Recruiter?” she asked.
My final finger dropped down to make a fist. “It’s not artificing. You’ve become family, Miss Dale . . . I’d love to be out their helping you . . . but . . . it’s not artificing. So what’s the point?”
Her smile went wane and sideways. “Call me Ceinwyn, King Henry. You’re too old for miss any longer.”
&nbs
p; “I could call you C.D. like Quilt . . .”
“Please don’t . . . one person doing it is enough.”
“Right.”
We watched over the Asylum, the August sun beginning to get lazy, sinking slowly. Ceinwyn put our trash back into her bag. I felt the buildup of anima from her, a soft rumble at my feet, then, with a flick of her hand a soft breeze blew across us. “You’ve spoken quite a bit about what you ‘don’t want’. What do you really want, King Henry?” she asked. “If you could just do what you wanted, with no other considerations . . . what would you want?”
I didn’t even have to think about it, I’d already been thinking about it for days. Years even. Stewing in the back of my head, since that Jobs Fair, since before then even. Back to Mom dying, back to finding out she was sick, back to the first day I’d met Ceinwyn Dale. It had all built to me saying these words, something much stronger than a simple breeze.
It led to: “I want to stop it.”
My voice hung in the air. A stone trying to fly.
Ceinwyn didn’t need to be told what I wanted to stop. She wanted it too. She fought a battle every year and it was getting worse and no one was stepping up to end it. Year after year, the kids left to the Mancy grew, population spiraling out of control, the Mancy swelling all over the planet. It dragged on and on and one day, one of those we missed was going to be powerful enough to not only be insane . . . but powerful enough to hurt a great many people. Butterflies don’t start hurricanes, but mancers do. We do volcanoes, and tsunamis, and earthquakes pretty good too. Years of anima saturation bursting out . . . it’s a nightmare.
“I want to stop it,” I repeated. “I don’t want to save the ones I can, out on the frontlines with you. I don’t want to teach the lucky few and I don’t want to follow the party line. I want to be an Artificer, my way. I want to experiment. I want to move this world forward. I want to cure them. Artificers can teach any normal mancer to give to a vial, why not something better, something that can fix Anima Madness? That can pull the saturation out of their bodies so they stop going crazy. That’s what I want. I want to ‘change the elemental nature of the world’. That’s what I fucking want!” I ended on a yell that carried up and down the length of the Mound, my chest tight, my voice hoarse.
Consider it the Manifesto of King Henry Price. I want to stop it. That’s why I do what I do. That’s why I’m putting up with the fucking teapots. That’s the goal. A brand new day. Where no one ends up like Mom. Where no kid grows up with a crazy parent like me. Where we can actually fix the problem fate made for us after a mancer gets missed by a Recruiter. Second chances . . . where would this world be without them?
I don’t know what I expected out of Ceinwyn. Not what I got, I know that. Maybe a hiccup or a tear or surprise, but I got none of that. Instead I got her smile . . . maybe a bit bigger than usual. I got the Ceinwyn Dale look. How Interesting. That’s her Manifesto. “Would it surprise you to know that the Lady, Plutarch, Guild Master Massey, and I have been meeting all day about what we’ve been calling the ‘King Henry Problem’?”
It took the wind right out of my sails and she didn’t use a single bit of anima. “Oh . . .”
“Yes. Guild Master Massey thinks we should just hand you over to him and be done with it.”
“Maybe I should punch Guild Master Massey in the face . . .”
“Perhaps that would work . . . however, the Lady and Plutarch were more open to compromise and this allowed Massey to eventually find the light himself.” Her still slim-fingered hand reached up to sit on my shoulder. Maybe she was looking for strings. “I’ve been ordered to come up here and offer you a job.”
My eyes found the dirt floor. “Recruitment then . . .”
“No,” she said, “not recruitment.”
I frowned. Not recruiting . . . then . . . “Ceinwyn . . . how long a game have you been playing?”
Her smile flickered. “Aeromancers read reactions well. We have to be quick to catch air, after all. When I first met you, I hoped . . . hoped that you would be one to spurn the Guild. There was another before you actually, Obadiah Paine, a classmate of mine who discussed the problem with me but he disappeared, went too far away from everyone. And there have been Artificers who have worked for various countries over the Guild or those who didn’t particularly like Artificer work. But you, King Henry, you’ve always felt just right—just rebellious enough but seeking to do something good. I hoped all these years and watched you grow and I’ve been so proud of you.
“I’m the last of the Dales, one of the greatest mancer families in history . . . we make the Welfs look like newcomers, did you know that?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “But for all the family trees I can draw, there’s no one else. Just friends and colleagues and you . . . King Henry. I live in a house provided for me by the Institution, I’m paid a wage I never spend and I already had family money to begin with. I’ve had plenty of it, just sitting there, no one to offer it to. I tried to get the Guild to take it in exchange for some experimentation on what you have in mind but they wouldn’t hear of it . . . before you came along I had no hope . . .”
I looked away from her before she could meet my eyes, hers were already tearing up and I didn’t want mine to go along with them. “Ceinwyn, if you make me cry in front of you, I’ll never forgive you.”
She sniffled. Badass Ceinwyn Dale . . . emotional. “I’d like to loan you the money, King Henry, to start your own Artificer shop.”
Oh . . .
What could be more perfect?
“How would it work?” I asked, curious but unsure of strings. I wasn’t going to let emotion entangle me. Not again.
“There would be conditions . . .”
“Always with you, apparently.”
“I’d pay you a wage, provide you enough containment vials to get started, secure property for you to work in and, of course, we would have to fund the front of the shop as well, but eventually you would have to pay me back. This is the Lady’s first condition,” Ceinwyn explained, back in control. “She doesn’t want me ‘blowing my fortune on a fool’s errand’.”
“What are the others?” On one hand they were strings, big huge strings. But on the other . . . being an Artificer . . . dear Mancy, I felt like whooping out in joy and planting a big kiss on Ceinwyn.
She finally caught my eyes. Blue and brown, air and earth. One wearing the other down, the other standing in the way of the clouds. “You would be on call to the needs of the Institution and the Council, should something drastic come up.”
“Like ESLED? Like Pak and Ramirez signed up for?”
“Not quite that.”
“Then what? That sounds like shit that’s going to fly back up my ass at the first chance it gets.”
“Do you think anyone really wants you investigating a crime, King Henry?”
“One minute you’re telling me I’m your long lost nephew and here you are slapping me around . . .”
“She wants to have the string, King Henry, give it to her.”
I’ve found that the problem with strings is that once you get a few, you figure one more ain’t a big deal. Then you count and you realize you can’t move on your own. I counted to make sure I had room for one more.
“Fine,” I decided after awhile.
“The shop would also have to be within a day’s travel of the Institution,” Ceinwyn went on.
“I ain’t going back to Visalia.”
“We’ll decide on it later. Reno maybe? Or Sacramento? The Guild also has three considerations before they sign off on it.”
“Fuck the Guild and their racecar hogging monopoly.”
“That’s what they worry about; you’ll be direct competition, so they want guarantees of their own.”
I crossed my arms and sighed. “Let’s hear the bullshit then.”
“They expect you to experiment; however, they don’t want you creating destructive weapons for the use of anyone but yourself and even then have asked you to exper
iment with defense in mind, not hurting anyone.”
“Fine . . . it’s not like I’m going to make a lightsaber or something . . .”
“Number two: they also require that you can be brought before them in trial should you do anything worth explaining.”
“Does ‘suck my dick’ count as explaining?”
“And number three: they want the designs of anything you create.”
My whole body went still. “They’re joking, right?”
Ceinwyn shrugged. “I told Massey it would never go over, but he made me ask just in case you agreed.”
“Massey doesn’t know me as well as you do.”
“Apparently not.”
The sun dipped down some more in another bout of silence.
“A shop.”
“Yes.”
“Like what? Comic store?”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea, you would never get any work done. What about stationary?”
“Yuck.”
“Or a bakery.”
“The FBI will think I’m a drug dealer.”
More silence.
“It’s a lot of strings, Ceinwyn,” I finally said.
“I know,” she answered. “Please say yes anyway.”
So many strings. Strings to the Asylum. Strings to the Guild. Strings to Ceinwyn. Strings to my hopes and dreams. But like I found out when I first said yes to the Mancy seven years before, sometimes you just have to grab on or else you’ll fall on your face. It’s not even as bad as back then . . . now I know who held onto me. I knew how to rip that son-of-a-bitch away from them if they tugged too hard.
And I could rip plenty hard.
“I’ll do it.
“Let’s stop it . . .”
Ceinwyn Dale gave me another smile, not interested or scary or humorous at all. One she really meant that time. Her best kind. “Thank you.”
“Says the woman who’s going to own me.”
We got up from my bench.
“I promise solid rates.”
“Do you have any idea how much anima vials cost?”
We started walking down the Mound, toward the buildings below.
“Do you have any idea how much artifacts sell for?”
The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady Page 27
